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Danelaw

Overall Layout

ASCII roguelike
Only available in English (saves me a hell of a lot of work getting a translation system in place on my own)
Takes place in Wessex c. ~880 CE
Stone walls and archer towers to prevent PC from leaving Wessex (to limit world scope)

Keep certain skills (such as literacy or understanding certain languages) behind skill points
Latin, Welsh, Cornish, or Norse are available second languages
Latin, Futhorc, and Younger Futhark are available literacy scripts (younger futhark was technically still transitioning from elder futhark at the time but whatever)
NPCs that speak English to a Norse-speaking PC or vice-versa get text that is worded differently to reflect they're mostly mutually intelligible but still different

Offer choice of religion for PC out of 9th-century Catholocism, a lingering form of native English or Norse paganism, or none
If native English paganism could possibly have survived for this long, some artistic license will need to be applied to cover the huge blank spaces in its recorded history
Regardless, non-Christian faiths could provoke certain NPCs

Light fantasy elements like folklore creatures, rune spells, or divine events
A bit of artistic license for gameplay and also to allow for player expression and interesting interactions

Stuff That Needs Artistic License

English Faith and Lore

Wooden: Chief of the gods, son of Sun
Free: Wife of Wooden, mother of humans
Tue: Husband of Sun, retired chief of the gods and tries to keep the sky clear
Thunder: Controls weather and argues with Tue about it, son of Earth
Moon: Brother of Sun, husband of Earth
Sun: Sister of Moon, wife of Tue
Earth: Mother of Thunder, wife of Moon, mother of animals

Elf: Small person that can shoot people or cows with arrows, lives outside
Hob: Small person that can do cool stuff for you if you leave out food while sleeping indoors
Pillywiggin: Flower fairies that sleep through winter and generally leave humans alone to instead playing around in flower gardens
Thirse: Umbrella term for large monsters
Boggart: Big swamp monster that eats livestock and people
Ettin: Big monster that eats livestock and people
Knucker: Water dragon that eats livestock and people

Standing stones
Rune spells
Healing charms
Flint arrow head pendants to ward off elf-shots

Technical Details

28.4 signed fixed point for world positions

each turn is an 8th of a second, normally walking 1 meter is 8 turns

map is split into 256m superchunks with 16m subchunks (TODO: interpolated or mixed with noise?)